Science Stories

A sensor-fitted ball, players wearing fitness bands during the World Cup matches, a coach looking at a live sprint-load number to decide whether to make a substitution: every heart-rate spike, every sprint is now data. But what does all this data mean for the players?

Another hot summer is coming. They arrive more often now, and they hit hardest in the city, where stone and asphalt hold the heat long after dark. Your city has surely thought about this. Most have a climate adaptation plan, full of ambitions for a cooler, safer place to live. Yet on the hottest days the street still bakes and the flat upstairs is unbearable. So where does all that planning actually go?

To develop from an average to an outstanding football player, training speed and physical power are essential but not enough. Field awareness, a player's ability to constantly scan the positions of teammates, opponents, and space and anticipate what might happen in the next few seconds, is a core skill of elite players. However, it requires experience, and practising it through conventional drills isn't ideal. A VR training, which student Soham Nanwani is developing, could change that: “Players can improve field awareness without physically exerting themselves.”

A World Cup stadium holds tens of thousands of people moving through security checkpoints, food courts, and different sections. For organisers, monitoring these crowds is essential for preventing dangerous situations. But do crowd monitoring systems protect people’s privacy? “Privacy is a human right. Privacy protection must be built into the design of the system,” Fatemeh Marzani, a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Twente, says.

Yellow grass. Low river levels. Nature reserves drying out. While people in the Netherlands are used to talking about flooding and excess water, we are increasingly facing the opposite problem: drought. At the University of Twente, researchers are working on an urgent question: how can we help the Netherlands, and regions around the world, better cope with drought and water scarcity?